Copy 2

I have no idea what I'm doing.

Attempted to produce a better likeness for the small scrunched up face in the previous post.  Now with layering from the ground up and 95% less erasing.  For the face, anyway.  The hair was a struggle.  Too wiry, not quite true to the original, could have been more efficient.  Always struggled with darker values.

Clearly not a gesture drawing.  On that note, though, loose but accurate...difficult to wrap my head around.  But it doesn't necessarily have to be fast.  But not so slow and accurate that it's becoming a contour drawing.  What do I know.

What makes for good landmarks?

Awesome measuring.  Got the left arm completely wrong.  Plus, it was originally an observation of just the one guy because I did a previous small scrunchy version and wanted to address it.  Everything else was an afterthought and now there's a huge space to the right because it wasn't originally accounted for.  And the hat.

And the eyes.  They really should read better before moving to the next part.  What am I going to do about you.

Source: Fred V & Grafix

More issues with darker tones, especially over a huge span.  Which direction do I even apply the pencil?  Hair issues, fix ear, basically anything but the face was neglected.  Especially the board because fuck all those knobs.  I already screwed around long enough with my tiny scribbles.  It wouldn't hurt to learn to work with larger strokes and speed things up, hm?


Am I done with my mindless copying?  What was the main goal?  To put down something, anything on paper.  Maybe it could have been a habit eventually and I'll stop being afraid.  How has it gone so far?  The fear is still there.  What's there to fear?  Real people, imagined people.  It's always been people.  Mostly the imagined ones.  Real ones are much less pervasive when you shut yourself out to most things, but they can be that much worse.  What's someone who can't cope with other people?  Weak.  Not some bullshit condition like social anxiety or depression.  Everyone has to learn to cope with other people.  So why don't I try harder?  Stop being lazy; that's all there is to do.  Simple as that.  Don't hide behind some made-up illness.  "Oh, but I hear there's a lot of documented cases and it's just like depressed people to downplay their problems."  No, they're absolutely nothing compared to people with real mental health issues; let those people receive help instead.  It's a finite resource.

I don't know why I don't try hard enough.  I can hardly look at anyone in the eye.  I don't know why I fear and sometimes hate people.  And they look so wonderful when you draw them.   

Copy

Source

Why didn't I utilize the entire page.

More old and not-so-old drawings.

Already in the middle of December.  I used to experience so many feelings, but now the seasons and special occasions are flying by.  Is it because the schools at my age don't decorate their halls?  And I ignore the television, the news, the outside.  I'm losing track of time.  I'd like to go out once more, very soon.  The malls will be decorated at least.

I wonder how that approach to drawing worked out.  I think I was too easy on myself.  If you reach a moment when you don't want to go on then you keep on going.  Is that right?  I haven't made a habit of drawing yet.  Even after doing something I'm still afraid to pick up the pencil the next day.  I think I waited too long on the personal drawings as well.  Way too much time for doubt to creep in and end up having second thoughts.  See, if I just went "And that's the end of my post, and here's some stuff I doodled on the side" then it wouldn't be a big deal.  Instead I go on talking and talking and it creates an expectation.  And it doesn't matter that it's a small unimportant blog; I should know to be careful of what goes on the internet.  But really, who's going to care for this.  It's all in my head, right?


I believe this was the modified contour drawing exercise...well, it says that on the paper but it's not really legible.  2012-02-11.  Not much to say about this one aside it making me feel more miserable than anything else the book threw at me up to that point.  Hard work is such a foreign concept.  I guess it's...okay to the untrained eye for a first attempt.  Discrepancies are easy to spot.  Obviously, I'd loathe to do this again.

How much time did it say to set aside?  An hour?  This took like four times as long.  At some point I have to learn to be efficient rather than take my sweet time accomplishing what essentially amounts to nothing.  Shiny trash is still trash.

An exercise in negative space drawing.  Draw one of the shapes on the viewfinder then scale up the rest on paper, focusing on the space between objects.  Picked an easy target; no excess curves.  2012/02/17.

Found a sketchbook from around 1998 with more of my stuff scribbled in.

I was quite fascinated with the evening sky back then, be it from a plane trip from England across the Atlantic or from Bowser in the Sky.  I dreamed about additional Bowser levels to play through...a total of seven counting the first three in Super Mario 64.  The level designs for all of them were never finalized (and the later ones would have been out of my scope to illustrate), but I went through a few ideas for the fourth level which can be seen in the first, second, and third image.

There's not much to see in the sixth image, but I definitely remember that was going to be the sixth level.  You can already see the structure meant to serve as a huge pool, and a bone fish was supposed to be swimming around in it with a red coin somewhere on its body.  Further into the level Mario would be jumping across the rooftops of residential areas.  It would be in the evening.  The image for the seventh level was dominated by a scene of Mario walking across a thin, weaving beam connecting two of the many skyscrapers in the city at night.  A stationary fire spitter (called a kuromame I guess) would sit further down on one of the beams that branched off.  The view was top-down; you could see the lights of activity below.  It would be weird, but worth considering for a future illustration.    

(Programming) Thinking up a turn system. (Part 1)

To get something out of the way real quick, I think I monitor my words a little too much while typing.  I mean it's good to make sure things come out as intended, but...it's already a bit of a time eater on top of sharing things, which could be time spent working.  It's a silly thing to gripe over when there's so many other activities I spend time that feel wasteful.  Another point is when I monitor my speech I don't think I convey my words the way I'd like to anyway.  I see people out there with much more colorful ways of expressing themselves, and I look at myself and...well, I can only be me, right?  But no, it's something I can and should learn to change if I really feel the need to.  For now I'll try not to pause myself too much to write down what's on my mind.  However, I'd like to cut down on "things" and "stuff," among other things.

So I put up programming as a description for this blog, and...what programming "stuff" have I talked about anyway?  I don't fancy myself to be an individual of ideas; I'm merely going through the book to know more and hope it magically qualifies me for a job.  Awful.  What ever happened to going above and beyond?  At least I'm capable enough to follow a book.

So about that RPG I brought up before.  After the initial rush of writing up whatever I could to stuff in there it's finally slowed to a crawl.  Burst of inspiration then run out of fuel, a common pattern.  The same could be said for my initial desire to learn to draw.  I guess the main thing that's stopping me is teaching myself to make something that's interactive and not stuck in the console or simple text boxes.  Sure there's other things that need working on, but...yeah.  That's where my passion slammed headfirst into a wall.

Programming is largely about using preexisting code.  I think that's what they say.  And I suppose you'd have to balance using other people's code while also knowing how it works to an extent.  Which I'm not doing right now.  Instead of searching for other works I wanted to think it up.  It certainly won't work like that all the time.  Let's see what this slow mind thought up, then?

Initially (way back then) when I was playing with the battle system I had an 'if' statement for whether or not the player is faster than the enemy.  If so the player gets to execute the commands first followed by the enemy.  Otherwise...I copied the entire block of code and flipped it so the enemy could go first.  Pretty clunky, and soon after when I got the idea of facing multiple opponents or even having a party system it would be guaranteed to be really ugly.  The idea for a queue system crept up, but I didn't feel I was ready to read up on that section.  It's a shame; I probably would have had fun thinking up how to do it with the arrays I had, but that code will inevitably become a relic when replaced with a proper class.  Just like my old inventory system that would shift back for removed items.

A few weeks ago I returned to the game to tinker with the battle system after learning about queues.  What kind do I want?  This is where it would help to have a lot of exposure to the type of game you want to work on, but I've holed myself up too much.  Even then I'm surprised at the number of games I've played, but that's by my standard.

At first I thought of the Pokemon games.  Each participant gets a single move each turn, to be spent in an order determined by speed or priority modifiers.  No, let's not stop there!  How about people who can execute more actions than others?  Golden Sun (only played the first) came to mind with certain bosses who could attack twice in the time it takes all four party members to make a move.  Won't it be tougher on balancing?  Sure, but who needs to worry about balance in a non-competitive game like this.  Plus it would be fun to see how it could be broken, and if no one is around to play it to even find out as is likely the case, well, at least I didn't spend all that time tweaking it.  A corrupt thought process, perhaps.

A visible queue system like in Final Fantasy X would be awesome (where the idea first came to mind).  It even shows the impact actions would have on the list when you have certain stuff selected!

If I was clever I'd put something clever here.

I forgot it had purple bars.  Let's read into the game later.

Next source of influence came from the semi-roguelike Elona.  Nice, plain speed stat.  Plenty of freedom.  I don't know the inner workings of it but since it had an ingame clock I think you'd be running on "standard" time with a speed of 100.  If I was brave enough I'd ask the people who worked on porting it.  In Java, no less.

Okay, we have a turn-based battle involving people of various speeds, some who can take more turns than another.  The first thought was to include an initiative stat that starts at 0 and is modified by speed.  Let's say you have:

Player 1: Speed = 50
Player 2: Speed = 25         

The first turn passes and player 1 will have an initiative of 50, and player 2 with 25.  This is sort of done on paper in the program so it's still figuring out who gets a turn.  We'll have an 'if' statement to check if either player has an initiative of 100 (the turn's standard), and if so that player will be added to the queue and have their initiative reduced by 100.  If more than one player is eligible for being added to the queue we'll go by their initiative levels in descending order.  If any of them have matching initiative levels we'll break the tie by speed.  If their speed is tied we'll flip a coin/roll the dice or give preferential treatment to the player.  And if we want to be super nitpicky we'll have the system remember who won the coinflip and give it to the other party next time.

Let's try again:

Player 1: Speed = 200
Player 2: Speed = 150

We'll represent them in parentheses (player1, player2) which will display their initiative levels.  The player who gets to be added to the queue will have their name printed in front and their initiative level will be subtracted.  Initiative level must be greater than or equal to 100 to qualify for a turn.

(0, 0)

<Turn 1>

(200, 150)
Player 1 (100, 150) wins by initiative
Player 2 (100, 50) wins by initiative
Player 1 (0, 50)

<Turn 2>

(200, 200)
Player 1 (100, 200) wins by speed
Player 2 (100, 100) wins by initiative
Player 1 (0, 100) wins by speed
Player 2 (0, 0)

<Turn 3>

(200, 150)

And so on.


Now let's try something more extreme:

Player 1: Speed = 600
Player 2: Speed = 300

(0, 0)

<Turn 1>

(600, 300)
Player 1 (500, 300) wins by initiative
Player 1 (400, 300) wins by initiative
Player 1 (300, 300) wins by initiative
Player 1 (200, 300) wins by speed
Player 2 (200, 200) wins by initiative
Player 1 (100, 200) wins by speed
Player 2 (100, 100) wins by initiative
Player 1 (0, 100) wins by speed
Player 2 (0, 0)

Okay, at least player 1 gets twice as many moves in a turn but it's sort of bad to let so many of them be up front.  So I was stumped on this for a few minutes (those were some long minutes) wondering how I could get the distribution of turns to properly scale. 

All right then, if we're basing this off of how many actions someone can perform in a given turn then why not let the person with the fastest speed set the pace?  If we have someone with 600 speed then everyone (including the turn which runs at 100 speed) would have to reach that before they can do something.  So it's like executing mini turns inside the actual turn because of relative speeds.

Player 1: Speed = 600
Player 2: Speed = 400
Player 3: Speed = 100
Turn: "Speed" = 100

The standardized initiative level to perform an action is set to the highest speed: 600

We'll have the format as (player 1, player 2, player 3) - (turn)

(0, 0, 0) - (0)

<Turn 1 begins>

(600, 400, 100) - (100)
Player 1 (0, 400, 100) - (100)

(600, 800, 200) - (200)
Player 2 (600, 200, 200) - (200) wins by initiative
Player 1 (0, 200, 200) - (200)

(600, 600, 300) - (300)
Player 1 (0, 600, 300) - (300) wins by speed
Player 2 (0, 0, 300) - (300)

(600, 400, 400) - (400)
Player 1 (0, 400, 400) - (400)

(600, 800, 500) - (500)
Player 2 (600, 200, 500) - (500) wins by initiative
Player 1 (0, 200, 500) - (500)

(600, 600, 600) - (600)
Player 1 (0, 600, 600) - (600) wins by speed
Player 2 (0, 0, 600) - (600) wins by speed
Player 3 (0, 0, 0) - (600) wins by speed*

(0, 0, 0) - (0) turn completes  

<Turn 1 ends>

*For all purposes the turn will always be dead last when initiatives are tied, even if the
player is slower than it (would come into play over the course of multiple turns).

The spread looks better now, doesn't it?

Actually, the very, very first idea was to have a large counter of sorts incrementing all these values at different rates, but that's sounds more suitable for realtime stuff.  I guess this would be comparable to an imaginary race to cross a 100 meter lap as many times as possible in 10 seconds.  You have one going at 50 m/s, another at 20 m/s...they'll cover different distances after a second (or fractions of a second if we want a smooth motion).  The second, minute, and hour hand on a clock would work, too.  Why didn't I think of that earlier?  

Cutting it off here.  I didn't intend for it to be this lengthy but then those examples came up.  Perhaps I should reformat the blog to be wider or figure out how to create a text area with a scroll bar to save space.  A few more things come to mind to cover.  There's the case of initiative levels "spilling over" because the speed of the turn didn't divide evenly into the standardized initiative.  And what if the player with the highest speed dies somewhere in there?  I've thought about it briefly but haven't put it into code yet because I'm forever a slacker.  I should have some to share when I post the second part.
  

Childhood Drawings

One of the sections in "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" covered the symbol system developed in your childhood years of drawing.  This apparently interferes with beginners who attempt to draw what they see in front of them; features are substituted with simpler representations in the form of symbols that appear when they recall it from memory.

Before this section the book took a trip down memory lane, trying to dig up a picture of a landscape I may have drawn using a set of symbols when I was five or six.  I don't doubt my involvement in such a drawing at that age, but I wasn't be able to piece it together and thus couldn't follow along when the book asks you to draw that landscape from your early years.  I thought nothing more of that landscape, but a few weeks ago when searching for the kiwi story I brought up in a previous post I stumbled upon a small cache of drawings I forgot ever existed.

The book mentioned how kids, when they grow older, place more emphasis on realism and attention to detail rather than the composition of the drawing.  The pictures I viewed gave that same feeling.  They felt just right, or that would be me fooling myself into thinking that because of nostalgia.  It might be the use of coloring pencils.  I haven't colored since...back then most likely.  It's also true that my drawings from this year are just random things tacked on a sheet of paper.  I haven't tried my hand at a whole picture yet.  I have an initial idea of one thing I want to try, and...I should get started on it already.

Hopefully the volume of pictures in one spot doesn't cause any loading issues.  Then again, I probably shouldn't be leaving ten exanded posts visible on a single page either.  Also, I'm lazy and would rather just drag this stuff on the screen than mess with the HTML, but there's a fair number of these.


So yeah, early stuff.  I won't go naming things here (or maybe I'll do it at the end of the post) since what it represents should be pretty well-known.  Although, I only have a vague idea of what's in the third picture.  I'm surprised I drew the bridge like that.  Also, making use of that 12" x 18" space!  Sort of.



Platformers and RTS games.  I can remember other images I drew now, but there's no telling where they could be.  Had to chuckle at the next two, but at least I was drawing and not dancing around the issue.  And it's possible to make out what's in there, mostly.  I suppose I can be relieved at that.



I guess I had a thing for ants.  Hey, it's actually dated 2003/03/28.  Second one was 2003/06/02.  Just...freedom.  I'm sure I didn't overthink the layout of the colony when I was doing it.  Do it as you go.



This one's definitely a no-brainer.  They looked a little too detailed, and a quick Google image search brings up the same poses I probably copied from.  The version of the fire I drew back then is more creative than anything I can muster right now.  Also interesting to note how I wanted to include the entirety of the right eye when viewing the face at that angle.  To do otherwise is sorcery!



Ah, what to say about this one.  For starters, that is such an unintentionally mean title!  I remember my disappointment over the grade.  I was like, "I don't even like writing and I spent this effort on drawing all while being afraid of how the person would turn out, and you gave me a 90 over this!"



This one is a bit more obscure, especially since there aren't any people around and it's not exactly a recreation of any scene.  And for some reason I labeled everything in the second image so there's actually a dead giveaway if you can read the text.  Dated once more: 2003/07/17, 2003/07/28, and 2003/08/04. 



Yep, coloring pencils.  They really make it feel more genuine.  I thought the last three pages were quite nice; I the miss the idea behind these pictures.  Over the years I haven't graduated; I've just become more deliberate and unable to produce simple drawings at will.  "No, you can't do this.  You're older now.  Childish drawings should be left to children."  Even the "serious" works are still crushed in detail by the complex drawings of nine-year-olds shown in the book.  Who knew they could draw at that level?  I don't know where I sit, then.  My childhood is officially uncreative.

I've already typed enough, though.  Not enough drawing.  At this rate I'll be the Touhou equivalent of that person who plays casually for five years and doesn't have a 1CC of Normal yet.

But real quick first, back to the pictures.  Starting with the first row we have the castle in Super Mario 64.  The third image is probably a mix of the Big Ben and my idea of a fortress of some kind.  Bottom of the first picture in the second row is drawn from the inside of the ship in Rusty Bucket Bay from Banjo-Kazooie.  Credits to the demo screen for ingraining that level in my memory.  Next two are from Brood War, followed by the mission Hell's Fury in Command & Conquer: Covert Ops.  Not idea about the fifth one.  Perhaps something from Raptor: Call of the Shadows or X-COM or a mix.

Third row drawings were inspired by SimAnt.  I always fantasized owning an ant farm where it's thin across the board so you can see the tunnels they build.  Main issue was shipping a queen over.  Fourth row for Pokemon, fifth row for the Amelia Bedelia series.

Sixth row is Ed, Edd n Eddy.  Third picture in particular pertained to the Jawbreakers! game released on the GBA.  Just an idea for extra levels.  And I guess the second picture follows the theme of makeshift...everything.  For the ladder we have: wood, umbrella, pencil, bat, crowbar, and...titanium. 

That should wrap it up.  No pictures about this year's drawing output in this post as I've already posted too much (another reason to delay!).  I haven't found the kiwi story yet.